The new Asus TUF A15 is one of the most versatile gaming laptops you can buy today. That's because it combines the new top-end AMD Ryzen APUs with Nvidia's Turing graphics silicon at an affordable price.The Asus F506IV (or TUF Gaming A15 to its closest friends) is neither a thin and light laptop nor a huge workstation It is not a machine.

Eight-core Ryzen Zen 2 processing can deliver the kind of CPU performance that video editors and 3D artists love, and a large, fast SSD plays a part. 90Wh battery and a 7nm APU make it a gaming notebook with almost unprecedented The battery can keep you up and running away from a power point for an almost unprecedentedly long period of time.

Certainly, at 5 pounds (2.3 kg), it's not the kind of Ultrabook machine you'd want to slip into a courier's bag to write a memoir in a coffee shop or annoy a friend, but it's not a huge desktop replacement, either.

And all for the very reasonable price of $1,300 (£1,300). I had previously checked out the previous generation version of this notebook, the Asus TUF FX505DV. It was a very smart spec machine with a mix of high-quality components and intelligent compromises to provide an adequate gaming experience for a mid-priced gaming laptop.

At this level of price, it's not cheap, but it's not like the Gigabyte Aero 15X or Alienware m17, which cost over $3,000; even Asus' Zephyrus and Strix Scar laptops in the more affordable TUF series While it will cost much more than a gaming machine, the lineup's specifications make it an excellent value, and any minor complaints I had about the original design have been more or less eliminated with this update.

The notable heart of the TUF Gaming A15 is clearly the new AMD Ryzen Mobile APU; the Ryzen 7 4800H gives up that honor to the Ryzen 9 4900HS in the Asus Zephyrus G14, but there is not much difference between the two Not really; the 4900HS is nominally faster, but with a TDP of 35W, it can fit into smaller builds. The 45W 4800H, however, is only 100MHz slower in peak clock speed and has virtually nothing to offer in terms of CPU benchmarks, thanks to cooling and dynamic frequency variations. [The 8 cores and 16 threads of the latest Ryzen APUs are among the most powerful multi-core silicon in non-workstation laptops, meaning the Zen 2 architecture has single-core performance on par with Intel's top mobile gaming processors

However, the Zen 2 architecture is not a single-core processor.

However, there was surprisingly little difference in the gaming performance of this latest Asus machine compared to the previous generation machine with a quad-core Ryzen 7 3750H. With a powerful graphics card, there is little difference due to processing power; the Far Cry New Dawn results look a bit odd, but this could be largely due to the newer drivers compared to the original benchmark results on the other laptops.

The Nvidia RTX 2060 may be at the bottom of the ray tracing ladder, but it is a great 1080p graphics card and is the sweet spot for gaming laptops. 1,920 CUDA cores, 6GB GDDR6, and ray tracing and tensor cores, you can get impressive gaming performance from this little machine. In addition, Nvidia's new DLSS 2.0 feature allows access to RTX-enabled games, such as the great new RTX-updated Minecraft, to keep games running smoothly.

The AI revolution may take over the world and decide that humanity is either an afterthought or a ripe powerhouse for its existence, but until then it is helping to make our games look beautiful and run well. So, on balance, it's probably worth the trade-off.

Backing all of this up is 1TB of solid state storage in the form of Intel's SSD 660p, an NVMe drive that promises to be much faster than rotating platter or SATA-based SSDs. However, because it uses quad-level cell (QLC) memory, the performance pecking order is quite low; QLC allows Intel to increase storage density and get such an affordable, high-capacity SSD, but at the cost of speeds that quickly drop as the drive fills up. quickly decline. They are also less durable than TLC or standard MLC SSDs, but you still need to completely fill the drive with new data many times a week to approach its limits.

So for general use, this should not be a problem.

The power behind the scenes of many gaming laptops is the battery. In most cases, the battery is not the hero, as they are generally quite weak; the TUF Gaming A15 is not, with a full 90Wh battery that provides an unprecedented level of uptime for a 15" gaming laptop. Battery life on thin and light laptops is long, but you'd be lucky to get more than an hour of runtime on a gaming laptop.

The Asus TUF A15, however, delivers almost two hours of gaming. Solid gaming, full-time 3D rendering, and not web surfing at work. If you do more light work on this machine, you'll get at least three times that, and probably more.

That said, as I said, this will be one of the most versatile gaming laptops you can buy. Gaming performance, CPU performance, and the ability to be away from a power source for extended periods of time. But where is the compromise?

It is clear that QLC SSDs are not top class, but they are still NVMe drives and are faster than most lower-end products. However, the previous generation of TUF gaming laptops had very noticeable chassis flex, especially under the keyboard, which is not the case with the Asus TUF A15.

It is made of plastic, but never feels flimsy. It's sturdy and looks like it could withstand a drop. In fact, I have it on good authority that Asus engineers have spent quite a bit of time testing the machine by dropping it from heights to see how it reacts, and judging by the feel of the A15, I think it will do quite well. Although, I draw the line at going this far in my own testing: ...... At least it's not intentional.

The Asus TUF A15 is also relatively delicate. The redesigned lid is rather more subdued than the previous design, with only a slightly darker gray, winged TUF logo on the front. Under the lid is another matter, with the full RGB chiclet keyboard lighting up like a Bellagio fountain.

However, Asus has one thing on its mind. That is that a $999 RTX 2060-powered gaming laptop is looming large on the horizon, and the combination of Nvidia's best-priced RTX cards and more affordable Intel CPUs is driving down the cost of mid-priced gaming laptops. And if you don't need the power of the Zen 2's eight cores for anything more creative than gaming, you won't need a processor as heavy as the TUF Gaming A15.

But as you can already tell, I'm still a fan, and the Asus TUF Gaming A15 shows that you don't have to spend a fortune on a gaming laptop to get serious performance in a variety of areas. Of course, we're biased toward gaming, but there's a lot more to this laptop. And all of it comes at a really decent price.